What’s Sex Got to Do With It?: Sexual Ethics and the Meaning of Marriage

Robert P. George, Ph.D., Princeton University

Today’s dominant views on sex and relationships often create a disconnect between sex and marriage. George contends that such views misrepresent the nature of sex and marriage by presupposing an implausible “dualistic” conception of the human person, and by treating each as a purely instrumental good. George reasons that marriage is instead an intrinsic good, and that the marital act (sexual intercourse) is a two-in-one-flesh communion of persons, which is only made possibly by the biological, emotional, and spiritual complemenarity shared between man and woman.